All posts tagged: DeWitt Cheng

Samson Young 楊嘉輝

Published by Artomity Magazine

By DeWitt Cheng / In The Invention of Morel, a 1940 novella by Adolfo Bioy Casares, a Venezuelan writer sentenced to exile on a deserted island in the South Pacific hides from a group of tourists who arrive suddenly. Observing them daily, he becomes fascinated and begins a journal recording their doings – and starts falling in love with a young woman named Faustine, who strangely ignores him when he approaches her. Even stranger, all the intruders repeat their actions again and again, as if caught in a Groundhog Day time loop. Later, the narrator discovers that the group’s host, Morel, is a scientist, and that the visitors are projected recordings of his guests, all of them granted technological immortality. After the guests have departed, the writer, having learned to operate Morel’s machine, interpolates his image into the projection, pretending to interact with Faustine. Eighty-odd years later, such plot lines may be commonplace in movies – like Woody Allen’s The Purple Rose of Cairo, with its movie characters stepping off-screen and into the real world …

Sin Wai Kin 單慧乾

Published by Artomity Magazine

The Story Changing / Matrix 284 Gallery, Berkeley Art Museum / Berkeley, California / Dec 13, 2023 – Mar 10, 2024 / DeWitt Cheng / The Story Changing, the first US museum show by Sin Wai Kin, the Canadian-born, London-based performance artist turned filmmaker, consists of two videos in a small exhibit in the Matrix 284 Gallery and the adjoining hallway at California’s Berkeley Art Museum. The title evokes the postmodernist artist’s concerns with narrative and language in the formation of identity, which they consider to be fluid and culturally determined rather than innate; it is also self-determined and performative, in line with the queer-scene drag shows that fascinated Sin—a recent nominee for the Turner Prize—as a young art student in London in 2009. “I think drag is like a magnifying glass,” they say. “To make something more extreme is to look at it more closely.” The curator, Victoria Sung, interviewing Sin, adds, “Language is such a powerful tool in terms of how it constructs our worlds, but also how it can constrict our worlds.” …

Wesley Tongson 唐家偉

Published by Artomity Magazine

Spiritual Mountains: The Art of Wesley Tongson 靈山：唐家偉的藝術世界 / Berkeley Art Museum 美國柏克萊大學藝術博物館 / Jan 12–Jun 12, 2022 2022年1月12日至6月12日 / DeWitt Cheng / Originality is the tacitly assumed essence and sine qua non of creative art. Young artists in the ultra-individualistic US sometimes avoid looking at older artists’ work for fear of being influenced or contaminated – to their detriment. Artists of the past learned from the masters by copying and assimilating. Arshile Gorky famously copied Picasso (“If he drips, I drip”), himself an omnivorous eye; and Ben Shahn praised the artists of the past as friendly ghosts, not obstacles or enemies. Creative talent may be inherent but it has to be developed. Postmodernist theory has added to the confusion in recent decades. The deaths of the author or artist and of individuality itself have been widely accepted in academia. Jorge Luis Borges parodied the death of originality in his prescient 1939 pseudo-article considering the literary achievement of “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”. “His admirable ambition,” wrote Borges, “was to produce pages which would …

Wesley Tongson

Published by Artomity Magazine

The Journey / By DeWitt Cheng / The idea that life is a spiritual journey was once common in European and American religious culture: Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan’s 1678 allegorical adventure of a Christian soul, used to be required reading. Spirituality has largely fallen by the wayside, however, replaced by modern materialism. In developed countries now we focus on scientific and economic progress, and largely neglect the spiritual aspect of life, still part of the social menu of traditional cultures, which patronising contemporary standards adjudge backward. The paintings of Hong Kong artist Wesley Tongson (1957-2012), aka Tong Ka Wai, in The Journey at San Francisco’s Chinese Culture Center through March 9, 2019, constitute a spiritual pilgrimage as well. Curated by Catherine Maudsley, and featuring biographical notes by Cynthia Tseng, the artist’s sister – who, she reveals, did her brother’s art homework when he was a child, before his interest in art surfaced in adolescence – the show reveals a talented hand, both disciplined and intuitive, at the service of a restless, relentless creative drive. Tongson, who grew up in a …